Composer Geraldine Mucha dies aged 95 in Prague

On Friday, Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha passed away in Prague, which
has been her home for most of the past 70 years. Author of numerous musical
works, large-scale orchestral pieces, variations on folk songs and chamber
pieces, Geraldine came to post-war Czechoslovakia with her husband Jiří
Mucha, the son of the famous artists Alphonse Mucha. For the past twenty
years, she has been the keeper of her father-in-law’s legacy, but her
life’s pursuit of music also helped pave the way for female composers of
the younger generations.

Geraldine Mucha, photo: CTK
Geraldine Mucha, neé Thomsen, began improvising on the piano even before
she entered school in London. Born in 1917, she chose a path that was
rarely taken by the women of her generation, choosing to study composition
with Benjamin Dale at the Royal Academy of Music.

It was while she was a student during World War II that Gerladine met her
future husband, writer and journalist Jiří Mucha, who is the son of Art
Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. Before arriving in Britain, Jiří served
briefly in the Czech legion in southern France prior to the Nazi invasion.
In an interview she gave to Radio Prague in 2005 Geraldine described how
the two first met while looking for a house in Leamington Spa where a party
was being held:

"Outside that house there was a young man in a French uniform and he
had been invited to a party, and so we decided that this is obviously a
party, so we all three went in. So this young man - that's my husband you
see, so I say I picked him up in the street! "

Geraldine moved to Prague with Jiří in 1945, making the city her home
for most of the next half century.

Jiří Mucha, 'Ředitel zeměkoule' documentary by Czech Television
Although in London she had met prominent composers of the time, such as
Sir Arnold Bax, William Alwyn and Alan Bush, Geraldine preferred the
classical music scene in Czechoslovakia to the one she left behind in
Britain. Although it was impossible to earn a living exclusively from
composing, she kept up with her passion and had some of her pieces
performed by the Czechoslovak National Philharmonic, among others.
She remained, though, utterly modest about her work, often speaking of the
emotional escape that composing provided her during difficult times.

Indeed, Geraldine’s life in communist Czechoslovakia was not without
hardship, often made worse by the so-called bourgeois roots of her
husband’s family. Having been forced out of the family house Alphonse
Mucha had built in Prague, and soon after facing her husband’s arrest and
internment in a uranium mine for almost four years, Geraldine did not
regret immigrating to Czechoslovakia. And although she moved to Scotland in
the 1970’s for the sake of her husband’s pursuits, the Muchas came back
to Prague right after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

After Jiří Mucha’s death two years later, Geraldine and her son John
Mucha continued his work on promoting Alphonse Mucha’s legacy. In 1992,
mother and son established the Alphonse Mucha Foundation and a few years
later helped found the Mucha Museum in Prague. A large part of the
museum’s collection is made up of paintings and items that were preserved
in the family home in Prague’s Hradčany. In an interview with Radio
Prague two years ago, John Mucha spoke of how his mother courageously
defended the family heirlooms from the Czechoslovak secret police:

John Mucha in '13. komnata' documentary by Czech Television“It’s interesting, what a lot of people don’t know is that if it had
not been for my mother, we would not be sitting here today. In 1950 or so
my father was arrested and accused of espionage, falsely. Of course the
secret police came to confiscate everything. My mother said, very bravely,
I’m sorry, all this is mine, and I’m a British subject! And they
didn’t expect that. They sort of became uneasy and then they said,
we’ll go, but we’ll come back. And they never did.”

Geraldine celebrated her 95th birthday this past July, and the last
performance of her work took place only a few weeks ago at Prague’s
conservatory, where the Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra performed
some of her compositions from the 1960’s and 70’s. A memorial service
for Geraldine Mucha will be held on 22 October in Prague’s Strašnice
cemetery.